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has none. Satan, on the contrary, possesses sympathy, and communicates it. Mephistophiles is cold and passionless; Satan, on the contrary, glows with passionate vehemence. Of course, Mephistophiles neither hates nor loves. The hatred of Satan is intense: his love for something, therefore, must be proportioned to his hatred. And here too, we may remark, how perfectly Goethe, in his portrait of Mephistophiles, painted himself, cold, being far removed from human sympathies, and loves, and passions; to whom life, with all its solemn realities, was no other,—no more,—than the picture in his study; in fact, to Goethe, the evil principle was a mere shadow, a terrible necessity of our being,-a negation, not a real existence. Not so Milton; his Satan stands there living-real-the being that did

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Defy the Omnipotent to arms."

The portraits of the two men are here. The one sitting in his study now anatomising a fly, now dissecting a beam of light,—while Europe around him was in a paroxysm and an agony, while every day would have brought to his door the wail of oppressed people, or the yell of disappointed tyrannies; the other meditating

his poem in the closing years of his life; a life spent with men, the greatest Statesmen of any age or nation, in defying, for the interests of Liberty and Humanity, the cruel and boundless ambition of princes and prelates. Sitting there in his study, fallen on evil days and evil tongues, but with a memory crowded with great recollections of work for the world, well done; a blind martyr to his own unflinching attachment to truth and freedom. Now it is in these characteristics of his great life that we are to look for the central idea of Satan. It is not too much to say this is the finest conception in the whole realm of poetry; nothing is like it; nowhere do we find the sublime feelings protracted to such unusual length; in no other page can we tolerate supernatural intervention. Gods and demons are perpetually doing things befitting neither God nor Devil to do here; we seem to be admitted to the mysteries of the infernal and the celestial world. Milton does not discourse to us of the origin of evil; he does not show us how it came first to be known in the world. Of course it is easy with Goethe or Philip Bailey to speak of it as a necessity—and we can now very well understand that evil is a law of our being; that that law is overlawed; and that now absolute evil does not exist in the

world; that it has its own limitations, and that eventually it results in abundant happiness. All this is easy to see and to say; but the thought yet meets us as it ever will, that evil, even as a means of education and discipline, appears to our poor minds far from the purity and the goodness of the Divine nature: but this terrible antagonism to the Infinite Supreme, this magnificent but perverse will, surely this is the height of evil; and where did Milton obtain this wonderful conception of Satan? Not from the theology of his own time, nor indeed the theology of any time. The hints thrown out in the Sacred writings are dim, vague, shadowy, but these were the foundation of this great structure. Let the reader think of the indistinctness of these hints, and the fully described collossal proportions of our poet's awful hero, and the wonder becomes miraculous. We must seek for our author's ideas of the birth of sin in the extraordinary episode which so many critics have quarrelled with, as objectional in the erection of the poem. Sin is born of presumptuous intelligence.

Satan is the portrait of

intellect without a God; and our readers will remember the parentage claimed by the portress of Hell Gate.

"Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem
Now in thine eyes so foul? once deem'd so fair
In Heav'n, when at th' assembly, and in sight
Of all the Seraphim with thee combined
In bold conspiracy against Heav'ns King,
All on a sudden miserable pain

Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swam
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide,
Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright,
Then shining heavn'ly fair, a goddess arm'd
Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seized
All th' host of Heav'n; back they recoil'd, afraid
At first, and call'd me Sin, and for a sign
Portentous held me; but familiar grown
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam'st enamour'd, and such joy thou took'st
With me in secret, that my womb conceived
A growing burthen."

And when the weird mother gave birth to that child, says she:

"I fled and cried out, DEATH!

Hell trembled at the hideous name and sigh'd
From all her caves, and back resounded DEATH!"

Thus Satan had plucked of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, before he offered it to our parents, and thus he began to sin. The allegory very finely illustrates to us that all evil has its

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origin in debate with God. The happiest life is that which gives the most unquestioning obedience there all is affirmation but no conviction; then comes the departure from conviction, then the everlasting negation; all is unhappy. Satan is the devil of the intellect, as Comus is the devil of the sense: they are both sophists. Satan imposes his sophisms on the intellect, and the reason, dealing in the subtleties of metaphysical speculation. Comus imposes his upon the senses and understanding, and deals in the forms that charm the imagination and the taste. It surely was not without intention that Milton portrays to us, upon the breaking up of the council of Pandemonium, the various occupations of the Lost. These were all in some measure transcripts of their great chief. They range themselves into six groups. There are the Demons of PLEASURE, who glide through the whirl of mimic battle, curbing the fiery steeds; and even in the dire scenery of the place of doom, they prick forth to aery tournaments. Next to these are the demons of AMBITION, rending Hell's rocks, and riding the fiery air as on a whirlwind, so that Hell scarce holds the wild uproar then the demons of VANITY, retreating to a silent valley, struck their harps with angelic notes to the fame of their own

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